Before sunrise, 35-year-old Auma Nancy is already knee deep in dew-covered ground, harvesting beans from her two-acre plot on the outskirts of Pabbo town council in Layik ward, Kal Turu Cell.
Auma moves quickly, skillfully tugging pods from stalks despite a dull ache in her lower back and a persistent rash on her arms and it is just two days earlier the field had been sprayed with pesticides.
“We do not need to wait for long. The pests do not wait and neither do we; if we delay, we lose the harvest,” Akello told tndNews.
Auma, like thousands of women across Northern Uganda, is a pillar of the agricultural system and according to available reports, women constitute over 70 per cent of Uganda’s agricultural workforce, from planting, weeding, harvesting and processing food for their families and for the market.
“Despite our crucial role in the food system, we do not know the hidden health risks of these agrochemicals. We are directly and sometimes indirectly exposed and many of us largely ignore it,” Auma revealed.
Although it is often men who handle or purchase chemical inputs, women are the ones left to wash the spray tanks, clean pesticide soaked clothing, tend fields soon after spraying and carry children through contaminated plots.
Josephine Lamwaka, a 38 year-old farmer in Parubanga parish, Pabbo sub-county noted that she did not know the danger of the chemicals her son sprayed in the maize field.
“I did not know it was dangerous; my son sprayed the maize field and I went to weed the next morning; I started coughing and I had chest pain for days,” Lamwaka disclosed.
Lamwaka has since developed chronic respiratory issues that her local health center attributes to dust or the weather; however, she believes it started with that exposure.
Additionally, many rural clinics and health facilities remain underfunded and understaffed thus rarely link women’s ailments to pesticides contact.
“Women come with skin rashes, headaches, fertility problems but we do not always know the cause. We do not have the diagnostic tools to link symptoms to agrochemical poisoning and sometimes we just treat the signs and send them back,” a clinical officer at Pabbo Health Center III in Amuru district reveals.
A 2020 comparative study on the use of pesticides among smallholder farmers in Uganda showed the vast majority of the pesticides being highly hazardous; with the World Health Organization revealing that they present high levels of acute or chronic hazards to human health and the environment.
However, a field survey by ActionAid Uganda in Gulu found that up to 60 percent of women farmers reported symptoms consistent with pesticide exposure yet less than 10 percent had ever received training in chemical safety.
“We mix the chemicals for them, they say it is our job to prepare everything but they do not tell us what is in the bottles, or how to protect ourselves,” Lamwaka said.
Oscar Bongomin, an agricultural extension worker in Pabbo town council noted that the problem is not just chemical but it is the cultural roles that determine who comes into contact with them.
He further revealed that in Northern Uganda, traditional gender norms remain strong, and men are typically responsible for buying and applying pesticides but it is women who, without gloves or masks do the washing, the weeding and the post spray harvesting.
He criticizes the labels on many agrochemical products which are printed in English or Kiswahili, languages few rural women in Northern Uganda can read fluently.
“Instructions are unclear, and training sessions organized by agricultural extension officers or agrochemical companies are often male-dominated,” Bongomin disclosed.
“The assumption is that only men need to know how these things work but it is women who handle the residue, who carry the risk,” he added.
Health consequences, silence and regulatory blind spot
William Nickson Odoch, an agrochemical dealer at Pur Ber Farm Supply in Pabbo town council disclosed that as commercial farming practices expand and the use of agrochemicals rises, rural women are bearing the toxic brunt.
Uganda’s agrochemical sector is poorly regulated with porous borders allowing illegal and counterfeit products to flood rural markets and with many unlicensed pesticides dealers selling unmarked bottles of herbicides and insecticides; some banned in other countries without safety guidance.
“When they come to buy seeds or chemicals, we sell to them and many do ask for prescriptions on how to use them. They just want something string that kills pests fast and dry the grasses,” Odoch disclosed.
The Ministry of Agriculture, Animal Industry and Fisheries (MAAIF) has policies on pesticides safety but they are not gender specific with the National Environment Management Authority mandated for environmental assessments yet enforcement in rural farming communities weak.
Paul Mwambu, Commissioner Department of Crop Inspection and Certification at MAAIF admits that as a government, they have a role in putting rules on safe disposal of pesticides containers and ensuring the health and safety of the population.
“We insist that safe disposal of containers of pesticides must be adhered to and management of containers for pesticides is part of the issues the law makers covered,” Mwambu noted.
He, however, revealed that the biggest challenge the ministry has is that on each of the containers of pesticides, there is a level explaining the danger, safety precautions and how to dispose and the content of the pesticides.
“Some of our farmers may not know how to read and those who know how to read do not take care to read the instructions that are there, even where they read and understand, they do everything out of carelessness,” Mwambu disclosed.
Mwambu further urged the community to use voluntary collection modules whereby the community can collect and take these containers to the dealer and the dealer can take these containers to Kampala and dispose of them safely through an incinerator.
“Even at district level, these can safely be disposed of in a scientific manner but if a collection mechanism is put in place and this should be done in a way that does not attract money because it increases cost but through voluntary mechanism, it can be done,” he said.
Mwambu, however, appealed to the district to set by laws based under the Agrochemical Control Act 2007 since some of these pesticides are very dangerous with law stating that whoever comes to buy subsequent products to bring back the evidence of the used bottle back to the dealer.
In Uganda, a large portion of Uganda’s agricultural production relies on smallholder farmers who widely use agrochemicals especially pesticides to protect crops from pests and diseases; however, the use of these chemicals, particularly highly hazardous pesticides, presents significant risks to human health and the environment.
By Okello Jesus Ojara & Esther Bridget Nakalya.
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